Various standards have been proposed to allow transparent bi-directional transfer of Internet Protocol (IP) traffic between the cable system headend and customer locations over an all-coaxial or hybrid-fiber/coax (HFC) cable network. Two such sets of standards have been developed, the first by the Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs) under the PacketCable project designation, which is commonly referred to as “PacketCable.” The second standard has been developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and is referred to as IPCablecom, TS 101 909 Digital Broadband Cable Access to the Public Telecommunications Network; IP Multimedia Time Critical Services. Among other things, these sets of standards specify a scheme for service flow for real-time services such as packet telephony. Packet telephony may be used to carry voice between telephones located at two endpoints. Alternatively, packet telephony may be used to carry voice-band data between endpoint devices such as facsimile machines or computer modems.
Today, access to the Internet is available to a wide audience through the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Typically, in this environment, a user accesses the Internet though a full-duplex dial-up connection through a PSTN modem, which may offer data rates as high as 56 thousand bits per second (56 kbps) over the local-loop plant.
However, in order to increase data rates (and therefore improve response time), other data services are either being offered to the public, or are being planned, such as data communications using full-duplex cable television (CATV) modems, which offer a significantly higher data rate over the CATV plant than the above-mentioned PSTN-based modem. Services under consideration by cable operators include packet telephony service, videoconference service, T1/frame relay equivalent service, and many others.
When providing any of the aforementioned services over a cable network it is necessary to reduce the level of echo signals that are present on the transmission paths. The echo signals, which are unavoidably present in each path between end users, are primarily echoes of the far end user's voice or voice-band data signals. These echo signals are carried on the transmission path to the receive end user and are reduced there based upon a so-called fixed analog loss plan. The fixed loss plan provides that a predetermined fixed amount of loss be present in the transmit and receive paths. The particular amount of loss depends on the standards to which the cable network conforms. For example, Cable Television Laboratories specifies analog loss plan of 4 dB in both the transmit and receive directions. On the other hand, the ETSI Guide specifies an analog loss plan of 4 dB in the transmit direction and 11 dB in the receive direction.
The need to reduce echo also arises in the context of the PSTN itself. In this case the loss plan is generally specified by the regional telephone companies and typically depends on whether the call is intra-office, intra-exchange (local), intra-LATA (toll) or inter-LATA (toll).
Given the wide variety of services to be deployed over various communication systems, it would be desirable to provide a loss plan that better optimizes the quality of service that can be offered by them.